The Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee refused to answer when a colleague asked him if he had coordinated his incendiary surveillance memo with the White House, The Daily Beast has learned.
During Monday’s contentious closed-door committee meeting, Rep. Mike Quigley, a Democrat, asked Nunes point-blank if his staffers had been talking with the White House as they compiled a four-page memo alleging FBI and Justice Department abuses over surveillance of President Trump’s allies in the Russia probe.
According to sources familiar with the exchange, Nunes made a few comments that didn’t answer the question before finally responding, “I’m not answering.”
Well actually that sort of IS an answer, isn't it?
In the meantime even Trump's own FBI Director has come out against releasing this memo.
Courtesy of Bloomberg:
FBI Director Christopher Wray told the White House he opposes the release of a controversial, classified GOP memo alleging bias at the FBI and Justice Department because it contains inaccurate information and paints a false narrative, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Wray was actually one of the few people allowed to read the memo, so he knows what he is talking about.
However that is not going to stop Trump:
President Donald Trump was overheard Tuesday night telling a Republican lawmaker that he was “100 percent” planning to release the memo, which was written by staffers on the House Intelligence Committee and is aimed at raising questions about the validity of the investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia, now led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
It should also be noted that reports are that Nunes himself has actually not read the classified documents that were used to write the memo, so he really does not know what the negative effect might be.
Of course he might not even really care.
Which leads us to this exchange:
On Tuesday’s edition of Morning Joe, political analyst John Heilemann asked a question of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) that he readily admitted “under almost any other circumstances would be ridiculous and absurd, but under these circumstances I think is actually warranted.”
“Is it possible that the Republican chairman of the House Intel Committee has been compromised by the Russians?” Heilemann inquired. “Is it possible that we actually have a Russian agent running the House Intel Committee on the Republican side?”
Murphy replied by saying: “I hope that’s not the case and I certainly have no information to suggest that it is.”
Notably, he did not call the notion “ridiculous” or “absurd.” Instead, Murphy suggested that Nunes was “instinctually” acting to protect President Trump.
“Doesn’t his behavior speak of that though?” Heilemann pressed on. “I’m not the first person who’s raised this. He’s behaving like someone who’s compromised and there are people in the intelligence community and others with great expertise in this area who look at him and say, ‘That guy’s been compromised.’”
I am trying not to go all "Alex Jones" here but I am beginning to wonder if there are not a number of Republicans who have been compromised by the Russians.
Source http://ift.tt/2nw5Smu
